Right before I ventured south seeking solace from the grey and rainy climes of Vancouver, we were contacted by East Side Games about reviewing their new release Dragon Up for iOS. Billed as somewhat similar to Tiny Tower, Dragon Up is certainly a unique title. My first impressions were of bewilderment, then interest. Despite being on a self-imposed technological sabbatical, I returned to my phone throughout my holiday not to check emails, but to play Dragon Up. After a week’s worth of effort, whatever interest initially spawned was outweighed by the fact that there was little to no reward for my efforts.
The marketing for Dragon Up features bold claims such as dragons pooping rainbows and barfing up coins, which was enough to spark this Jackass fan’s interest. Part RPG and part game of chance, you start with a single dragon that you send on quests. Quests earn you coins and potential treasure, but cost you happiness (measured in hearts). New quests yielding greater rewards are unlocked through levelling your dragon up. You don’t physically do anything on quests (your dragons perform them off screen). The game play interaction is simply to manage your dragons and their resources.
This mild strategy presents trade offs between monetary reward and down time until the dragon selected can go on another quest. Dragons have three slots in which items can be equipped. Certain quests have higher chances for special items, but I found general items can be won doing any quest. The higher-level specials can produce significant level rewards. My advice is to ignore the specials offered in the lower level quests. Just focus on the specials in the higher level ones. You stand as much of a chance getting a reward in any quest, so focusing on the lower level specials isn’t really worth it.
Dragon Up features a guild system where you can join friends, make new ones, share and trade various items. The downfall here is that the game requires Facebook to do so. If you are one of the few who don’t use Facebook, or are hesitant like me about Facebook apps and privacy, you are out of luck.
While the game itself is free to play, there is no shortage of opportunity to spend money. The amount of prompts gets tiring fast. I chose to review the game spending no money on the in-game offers. If you are willing to invest a considerable amount of time, it appears you can enjoy everything Dragon Up has to offer at no cost. Gems are extremely hard to come by – especially early – and this makes progress painfully slow.
This is a game that you don’t pick up and play for extended periods either. You pick it up, manage your dragons and then wait for them to do their thing, and whatever time constraint that comes along with that has to run its course. Yes, you can pass the time by feeding your dragons, but this involves nothing more than holding a button to move a boat to whichever dragon it is intended for. Once you get a decent sized stable of dragons leveled up, the times needed for them to spew out the rewards and then to nap in to regain happiness can be measured in hours.
Dragon Up has a bright and colourful look. The description in the App Store says the game is optimized for iPhone 5. Playing on the iPhone 4, I experienced several graphical stutters and hiccups when moving the boat up and down between my dragons. It was more pronounced as the number of dragons I had increased and dependent on if they were puking up coins or not. This really didn’t detract from the experience though I must say.
For a game that touts the vulgarity that it does, I was surprised when there wasn’t much in the way of sound for these “events”. The bulk of what you hear is harmless background music. In fact, the majority of my play was with the sound muted (I must cite “family reasons” here) and it didn’t impact gameplay in any way.
Dragon Up’s lure of levelling up and potential rewards is entertaining for a while, but after a week’s worth of play I realized that I had nothing to show for my efforts. That’s when I knew I’d had enough and turned it off. It wasn’t a bad experience; just one I didn’t find rewarding enough to continue. The incessant, shameless attempts at monetization got irritating too.
